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328 pp., 6 x 9
10 illus.
Related Subjects:
To Fight Aloud Is Very Brave
American Poetry and the Civil War
A ground-breaking study of the full range of Civil War poetry
Focusing on literary and popular poets, as well as work by women, African Americans, and soldiers, this book considers how writers used poetry to articulate their relationships to family, community, and nation during the Civil War. Faith Barrett suggests that the nationalist “we” and the personal “I” are not opposed in this era; rather they are related positions on a continuous spectrum of potential stances. For example, while Julia Ward Howe became famous for her “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” in an earlier poem titled “The Lyric I” she struggles to negotiate her relationship to domestic, aesthetic, and political stances.
Barrett makes the case that Americans on both sides of the struggle believed that poetry had an important role to play in defining national identity. She considers how poets created a platform from which they could speak both to their own families and local communities and to the nations of the Confederacy, the Union, and the United States. She argues that the Civil War changed the way American poets addressed their audiences and that Civil War poetry changed the way Americans understood their relationship to the nation.
"This is a very exciting work—original, sophisticated, magisterial, and important. It is a ground-breaking analysis of poetry in the Civil War that combines a reassessment of the most celebrated literary and popular poets of the war years with the recovery of a large group of lesser-known poets; the book unites an unusually wide range of poets—African American and white, Northern and Southern, male and female. . . . The writing is smart and forceful throughout, with particularly dazzling analyses of literary form."—Elizabeth Young, author of Disarming the Nation: Women’s Writing and the American Civil War
"Barrett breaks new and important ground by beginning to situate the work of poets, some newly ‘recovered’ like Sarah Piatt and George Moses Horton, some canonical, like Dickinson and Whitman, in relation to one another. In doing so she starts to map out the complex field of poetic production, circulation, and reception during the period. The book will have a powerful influence, and it will open up a range of possibilities for new work in the field."—Eliza Richards, author of Gender and the Politics of Reception in Poe’s Circle
"Barrett breaks new and important ground by beginning to situate the work of poets, some newly ‘recovered’ like Sarah Piatt and George Moses Horton, some canonical, like Dickinson and Whitman, in relation to one another. In doing so she starts to map out the complex field of poetic production, circulation, and reception during the period. The book will have a powerful influence, and it will open up a range of possibilities for new work in the field."—Eliza Richards, author of Gender and the Politics of Reception in Poe’s Circle